Board of Directors

Laura Frank, Board Chair

Laura Frank, president and general manager of news at Rocky Mountain PBS, was founder of I-News, the nonprofit investigative news organization that merged with Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting in 2013. RMPBS News continues to deliver multimedia investigative reports to news outlets across the Rocky Mountain region. Frank, a Denver native, has nearly two decades of experience at daily newspapers and in radio and public television. She was an investigative reporter at the Rocky Mountain News until it closed in 2009. Her stories have won top awards in both print and broadcast, helped release innocent people from prison, protect abused children and win aid for sick nuclear-weapons workers.

Brant Houston, Secretary and Board Chair Emeritus

Houston is a co-founder of the Institute for Nonprofit News, which began with 27 member organizations in 2009. He also has been active for the last seven years in supporting many INN member organizations as they start up, providing organizational, fundraising and editorial advice. Houston is a professor and Knight Chair of Investigative Reporting at the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he oversees an award-winning newsroom. Houston previously served for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 5,000-member organization. Before joining IRE, he was an investigative reporter at U.S. daily newspapers for 17 years. Houston has authored four editions of “Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide” and co-authored the fourth and fifth editions of “The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook.” He has taught investigative and computer-assisted reporting in 25 countries, and he is co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Reginald Chua, Treasurer, Public Seat

Chua is executive editor, editorial operations, data & innovation at Thomson Reuters. Among other duties, he manages global newsroom operations, safety, logistics and budgets at Reuters. He also oversees data and computational journalism, the graphics team, and works with corporate technology and R&D teams to develop newsroom systems and tools. He was previously editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post; prior to that, he had a 16-year run at The Wall Street Journal, including as a deputy managing editor in New York, where he managed the global newsroom budget, supervised the graphics team, and helped develop the paper’s computer-assisted reporting capabilities. He ran the Journal’s Hong Kong-based Asian edition for eight years, opened the paper’s bureau in Hanoi, and was its correspondent in the Philippines. Chua is based in New York.

Anne Galloway, INN Member Representative

Anne Galloway is the founder and editor of INN-member VTDigger.org and executive director of the nonprofit Vermont Journalism Trust. VTDigger, based in Montpelier, VT, is dedicated to watchdog coverage of state government, politics, education, business, energy, health care, the environment and criminal justice. Sixty-five percent of VTDigger’s revenues come from sustainable sources. In 2015, the organization has a 13-member staff, 150,000 unique readers a month and a budget of $1 million. VTDigger has received funding from the Knight Foundation, Sunlight Foundation, Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and J-Lab. Galloway previously worked as a reporter and editor in Vermont for 20 years. She was the editor of the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre Times Argus from 2004 until January 2009, when she was handed a pink slip along with 16 other employees. For many years, Galloway was a contributing writer for Seven Days Newspaper in Burlington. Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times (the Vows column), the New York Daily News, Vermont Life and City Pages (Minneapolis).

Sheila Krumholz, INN Member Representative

Center for Responsive Politics

As executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, Sheila Krumholz is the nonpartisan watchdog group’s chief administrator and spokesperson, and is cited frequently in prominent national media outlets. Sheila became Executive Director in 2006, prior to which she was CRP’s research director for eight years, supervising data analysis for CRP’s website, OpenSecrets.org, and for CRP’s partners and clients in the media, academia and elsewhere. Sheila has testified before Congress and the Federal Election Commission on issues related to government transparency and regularly makes presentations to scholars, government officials, NGOs that conduct research and advocacy, and at meetings of professional news organizations. During her tenure, she has grown the organization to a 20-person staff with 7 million unique visitors to its OpenSecrets.org website and 30,000 media citations in 2016.

Marcia Parker, INN Member Representative

Marcia Parker is publisher and chief operating officer of CALmatters, a nonprofit journalism organization covering California politics, policies and personalities. Prior to joining CALmatters she was executive director of content and audience engagement for Penton’s Technology news portfolio. She previously was editorial programming and audience development director at State.com, a global opinion platform, and was West Coast editorial director of Patch.com, AOL’s venture into hyperlocal journalism. Parker taught at and was assistant dean at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for several years, and then joined the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley. She served as launch manager for the website of California Watch, CIR’s statewide investigative reporting unit. Previously she did stints at AOL, where she was a director of programming, and was assistant managing editor at Intuit’s quicken.com, then the leading personal finance website.

Norberto Santana Jr., INN Member Representative

Norberto Santana Jr., is an award-winning investigative reporter with 20 years of experience at major daily newspapers. Before founding Voice of Orange County in 2009, Santana was a lead investigative reporter for the Orange County Register and spent a decade covering local governments across Southern California with newspapers such as the San Diego Union Tribune and the San Bernardino County Sun. He also worked as a staff writer with Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C. and covered territorial government with the U.S. Virgin Islands Daily News. In addition to his experience as a journalist, the Southern California native has a master’s in Latin American Studies and has worked as an elections analyst with the National Endowment for Democracy. He also has direct experience on Internet start-ups as one of the founders of CubaNet.org, a website for dissident writers inside Cuba that has operated since 1995. As publisher of Voice of Orange County, Santana has worked on numerous aspects of building a startup civic newsroom including recruiting and retaining diverse staff, board members, foundations and distribution partnerships. Over the past six years, Voice of Orange County has published nearly 6,000 stories, created a following of roughly 50,000 monthly unique visitors, successfully led two public records lawsuits and reached the $500,000 budget mark. The newsroom employs a half dozen reporters and editors and is expanding this year with a membership, sponsorship and events program.

Nancy West, INN Member Representative

Nancy West founded the nonprofit New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism almost three years ago and is the executive editor of its website InDepthNH.org, with a mission to hold government accountable and give voice to marginalized people, places and ideas. West has won many awards for government, business and investigative reporting over the years. Much of her reporting over the years has focused on the criminal justice system, child abuse and mental health. She started out with very little money and InDepthNH.org has steadily gained readers and respect and is now on the verge of figuring out how to bring in enough money to pay people and grow. The need is great here in this news desert. West is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She is a mother and grandmother and is passionate about always telling truth to power and then hoping for the best.

Neal Shapiro, Public Seat

Shapiro is president and chief executive officer of New York public media provider WNET. Before coming to WNET, Shapiro was president of NBC News from June 2001 to September 2005, where he oversaw the global operations of NBC Universal’s top-ranked news division: "Today" in the morning, "NBC Nightly News" in the evening and "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning. From 1993 to 2001, Shapiro was executive producer of "Dateline NBC." Before NBC, Shapiro spent 13 years at ABC News, where he produced for all the network’s news programs and worked with Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson, among others. Shapiro has won 34 Emmys, 31 Edward R. Murrow Awards, nine Sigma Delta Chi Awards, three Alfred I DuPont-Columbia University Silver Batons, three George Foster Peabody Awards, three George Polk Awards, three Overseas Press Club Awards and many more. Shapiro graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University with degrees in history and political science. He has taught journalism at Tufts and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has lectured at many universities, including MIT and Stanford.

Bruce Theriault, Public Seat

Theriault has been a senior executive in local, state, and national public media organizations for nearly four decades. Until May 2016, Theriault was senior vice president, journalism and radio for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he

led initiatives to encourage, fund and build stronger local, regional and national public media journalism through collaborations and partnerships. Previously, as co-managing director of Public Media Co. Theriault worked with public radio stations to expand their services through creative partnerships, acquisitions and finance strategies. Theriault also helped develop and launch Marketplace and Public Radio International’s The World while SVP of PRI and managed KTOO-FM and KRBD-FM in Alaska, where he co-founded and served as president of Alaska Public Radio Network and launched Alaska News Nightly, the first statewide daily news program for public radio. Theriault helped establish and then served as chair of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB). Currently, he is president of Bolder Strategies, a strategic management consulting firm to nonprofit public media organizations. Theriault holds the degree of master in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School. In his spare time he enjoys mountaineering and road biking.

Hsiu Mei Wong, Public Seat

Wong is a member of the Management Group at PA Consulting Group, a global consulting, technology and innovation firm. She has over 20 years’ experience in planning, developing and managing complex initiatives in the financial services, healthcare, consumer goods and media sectors. She uses cross-industry insights to drive business and operating model innovation. She has a unique perspective on these industries having worked in North America, Australia, China, Thailand, Singapore, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Germany and the UK. Wong has worked with many Fortune 100 companies to advise and deliver major transformation, develop new revenue streams, set direction for digital initiatives and deliver business improvement projects. Wong’s previous work includes helping to launch CampingRoadTrip.com and a five-year stint at the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ). She is based in New York.